Today, public discourse is muted, and people lament the loss of the byproducts of virtue, like falling self-discipline and rising selfishness.

Not to mention the rampant corruption at all levels of modern society that makes us fear that virtue is, in fact, long gone. As a small indicator of this, a graph of the frequency of words occurring in books over time shows a rapid rise of the word “technology” in the past 40 years against a two-century slide in virtue.